Garden - Ancient Grapefruit Tree

The house came with a few nice trees, the most significant being the large grapefruit tree.

It used to do well before I started digging into the ground and cutting through roots. I feel bad about that, I think its fruit production dropped by 80% last year.

Ancient Grapefruit Tree February 2015

Its really dying back and i've done a lot of sawing off of dead limbs and theres quite a bit missing now. I even just brought a long tree limb saw and have started targetting some of the dead wood right up in the top. Its all going to come down and so its better to do it bit by bit. the photos are not all in the correst order but I think they are good enough. The February 2015 photos are after the June 2014 photos. Not the biggest disaster.

Ancient Grapefruit Tree June 2013

As you can see, its massive. I think its near to dying so im thinking ahead and replacing it.

Ancient Grapefruit Tree August 2011

Spent a morning cutting out dead wood. After the collapse of the orange tree I thought I would consider this tree. Managed to get quite a bit of old wood out including a very large limb that I had to climb quite high up to get at. Theres still the lower trunk of that dead limb to do but I think I have time for that. Im concerned that the ants are hastening its demise, the wood was riddled with ant holes and I nearly got eaten when I kicked off a rotten limb that was essentially full of ants, I used a rope to stop the limbs from falling and I could see the ants rushing out and actually biting the rope. It was bright blue and easy to see. I got out of the tree and elected to do the rest later. Whats left is pretty easy to get to but its quite large and could use 2-3 cuts to bring it down in managable lumps, but thats for another day. Im sort of happy that if it fell it would cause less damage.